Supposedly, Amazon has implemented a new pricing error system, to help with this, but I’d be interested in their plan to catch all of the impossibly low prices some sellers post. I mean, if you sell a board game that’s gonna cost you $15.00 to ship, for a dollar, you’re paying your customer to take it, right?

Actually, I had someone from Amazon explain this to me. We have a product that is $39.00 and someone was selling it $9,999.00 so I called Amazon to see what was up with that.

They said that some sellers will list a product that they are not yet prepared to sell just to get the listing up. The seller will put a price on the product that they know will result in no sales. i don’t really understand the point of that but it sounded as good as any explanation that I could come up with.

I think your theory is the most plausible. I think those sellers are deliberately skewing the pricing algorithms, in a way that I can’t quite work through in my mind, thus can’t explain. Or, they are sellers who have multiple accounts. They want to make their price seem reasonable, by listing a phantom item at an impossible price. Or??

Also for reasons I can’t quite explain, I don’t like the idea of parking a nonsensical price in order to protect one’s inventory.

It seems like a price listed out there for the Amazon public should be a legitimate price!
I mean, wouldn’t we all cry foul if Walmart did something similar?

It should not be a way to safeguard one’s inventory or let the marketplace settle on a price.
I’m actually very surprised that Amazon allows this.

That’s a dumb way of keeping track of your inventory! Why don’t you just put it into your inventory with 1 and then go back and change your qty to 0? Then it is in “all” your inventory and also in your “inactive”. When you want to sell it, just go to inactive and activate it. Then you don’t stick some dumb ridiculous price on it, but simply change your inventory to 1 or however many you have.

Apparently you don’t quite get what an inventory system is all about and probably shouldn’t be selling on Amazon or anywhere else, as far as that goes.

I do know that sometimes when you put in the UPC, some people make up their own products and pricing and the system pulls up the item and wants to know if you will price match. That could be where some people are thinking, Heck, if that’s what this product is going for, why not?! I think that would be the real answer to your question.

Would YOU want Amazon to suspend your listings saying “you’re charging more than what we deem appropriate for your product type”? How much draconian control do you want Amazon to have over your products?

If you have an employee doing your listing you might not want him or her pricing the product so you have them put in a safe price. I do this with movies I know have a tendency to sell out like criterion collections, but I think the way over priced has some other agenda. I will also overprice if everybody is selling it for a penny. I often believe the penny sellers are just trying to get there statistics up from cancelled or out of stock sales.

Thats partially true,but some sellers believe they have collectors items and just want to cash in take for example EC Comics i even asked some sellers if it was a misprint they said no, everybody wants to get rich

Some sellers have database management programs that make it difficult to remove listings and instead of removing the listing, they increase the price. This way, they won’t get a sale and it will be faster and easier to add the item back into the database when they get new inventory.

I just noticed an error in my listings where I had one book listed at $9.78 trillion because the ISBN got entered into the price cell. Sadly, it did not sell.